Thought this would be easy.

Read through all the documentation on the "date" and nothing seems to work. I want to change it so the date indicates a 12-hour clock rather than 24-hour. I was able to have it change it's format for outputing by calling:

date +'%x %r %Z'

which outputted

12/10/03 10:01:29 PM PST

But after that, if I just called date I'd get:
Wed Dec 10 22:12:51 PST 2003

What's the use of having the date function just change the output format for a single-time use?

All Linux commands are meant to run the same always if run without options. By running " date +'%x %r %Z' " you're passing options to date for that one time only. If you want date to return this every time you'll need to set up an alias. I suggest not calling it date but maybe 'now' or 'clock'. To setup an alias go to your home directory, open up .bashrc (notice the '.' before bashrc) in a text editor (vi, emacs, pico, gedit, etc.), and add this line to it:
alias clock="date +'%x %r %Z'"
Again, notice that the last little bit is ' (single quote) followed by " (double quote) which is kinda hard to show now that I look at it.
Save .bashrc, run 'source .bashrc' and the 'clock' command should output the date like that. Some other useful aliases are:
alias ll='ls -lh --color'
alias more='less' #'less' is a better pager than 'more'

I don't see a file called .bashrc in my home directory.

/home/*** (*** represents my user name) contains no file of that name.

Not sure what to do.

make that file then :-)

The main reason I'm trying to do this is the clock displayed all the time in my wm (I'm using Icewm btw) is displaying the time like so:
23:21:24
And I want it to say 11:20 PM.

I don't think creating this new clock alias will do anything with respect to this.

Oh, I see. The way IceWM displays the time is controlled by its preferences file. The IceWM site has some good stuff about how to edit this file and I remember that one of the preferences is to control the output of the clock. Try checking the IceWM FAQ for more detailed instructions.