Page Insists on Ignoring the MORE Tag

Hello,

I’ve set up a pages to display content from specific categories by basically copying the index page loop in addition to this line:
<?php query_posts('category_name=NEWS&showposts=5'); ?>

It all works great except that it ignores the MORE tag in each story. If I use excerpt, that works… but I don’t want that, I want to have a “Read on…” link.

I’ve tried so many ways of coding, I’m assuming a PAGE is somehow automatically trained to ignore MORE tags. The same loop works great in the ARCHIVE page and it properly displays the MORE tag, so I know it’s not a problem with my loop, which, just so you know, looks like this:

<?php while (have_posts()) : the_post(); ?>
<div class="post">
<h2><a href="<?php the_permalink() ?>" title="<?php the_title(); ?>"><?php the_title(); ?></a></h2>
<p>By: <?php the_author_posts_link(); ?> &bull; Filed under: <?php the_category(', '); ?>
<?php edit_post_link('[edit post]',' &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; ',''); ?>
</p>

<div class="contenttext">
<?php /* the_excerpt(); */ ?>
<?php the_content('<p>Read more &raquo;</p>'); ?>
</div>

<p class="postmeta">
<span class="timestamp">Posted on <?php the_time('j F, Y (H:i)') ?> </span>
<br />
<?php the_tags('Tags: ', ', ', '<br />'); ?>
<?php comments_popup_link( 'No Comments Yet', 'Comments: 1', 'Comments: %', '', ''); ?></p>
</div>

<?php endwhile; ?>

Please, does anyone have any suggestions?