I see they are showing correctly now. What worked to make them appear?

It just occurred to me that your "shop by manufacturer" function is already there, and you only need the text changed. This can be easily fixed by searching in the Developers Toolkit for "Please Select", or better still "define Please Select".
THis should show you the language file where that text is defined, and you can edit that to read as you wish. You might check that it is not a universal constant that is used elsewhere; if so, it will be trickier to separate out.