I assume I am missing a step, but keyPressed doesn’t seem to be getting called until after I click on my window once. In a stab in the dark I have tried calling setWantsKeyboardFocus and grabKeyboardFocus, but this does not seem to help. any advice is welcome. 
ok, I figured it out… my Document Window had focus intially, so I added a call to my ContentComponent’s grabKeyboardFocus, and it seems to be doing what I want…