Thanks. The OS was a little old. now logrotate shows version 3.19
I am still getting a lot of NTP activities and I am not sure why. I did correct the time zone.
the logfiles seems to be working but there are a couple of duplicates. not sure how to get rid of them.
Didn't want to the wrong command and nuke everything 
-rw-r--r-- 1 pihole pihole 7796 Feb 1 18:56 FTL.log
-rw-r--r-- 1 pihole pihole 492020 Feb 1 18:25 FTL.log.1
-rw-r--r-- 1 pihole pihole 1466 Feb 1 00:00 FTL.log.2.gz
-rw-r--r-- 1 pihole pihole 20841 Jan 31 00:00 FTL.log.3.gz
-rw-r----- 1 pihole pihole 406337 Feb 1 18:57 pihole.log
-rw-r----- 1 pihole pihole 146792774 Feb 1 18:25 pihole.log.1
-rw-r----- 1 pihole pihole 3794301 Feb 1 00:00 pihole.log.2.gz
-rw-r----- 1 pihole pihole 6437440 Jan 31 00:00 pihole.log.3.gz
-rw-r----- 1 pihole pihole 3420679 Jan 30 00:00 pihole.log.4.gz
-rw-r----- 1 root pihole 46936 Jan 31 10:34 pihole_debug.log
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 5640 Jan 28 22:33 pihole_updateGravity.log
the files did grow but just by a little