Did you use the 't' in the client or add the default parm to the indexing?
On multiplatform you can do the following to pull in a default date using regular expressions.
FIELD2=UL(0.00,1.82),LR(8.50,2.06),0,(TRIGGER=1,BASE=0,REGEX='[A-Z][a-z]+ [0-9]+, [0-9]{4}',DEFAULT='January 1, 1970')
We try to use something that makes it obvious it's a default value.