Are there any startup services or hooks that I can use to initially create some service classes within the EJB container? In other words, can I get a piece of my code to run automatically at container startup?

The simplest way to do this is to start your own "shell" main program and launch the container from within it. For example:

public class Shell {

  public static void main(String[] args) throws Exception {
    // do your startup stuff here...
    com.inprise.ejb.Container.main(args);
  }

}
This will allow you to start up services within the shell.