crooked blade

The short version of the setup process is that the blade is aligned to the miter slots in the table, and the fence is also aligned to the miter slots. You can check the blade parallelism with combination square, slide the body of the square along the slot and use the ruler of the square to determine if the blade is parallel to the slot. On my belt drive saw, the blade is adjusted by loosening the six bolts that secure the blade arbor trunnions to the bottom of the table and then tapping the rear trunnion in the desired direction.

There should be some screws on your fence that you can loosen to adjust the fence parallel to the miter slots. (I have a newer fence, so my instructions probably aren't useful for yours.) You may want to consider replacing the fence. I believe both Sears and other companies offer replacement fence systems that will be a lot easier to use.

If you don't want to go through the whole setup right now, just use a tape measure to check that the fence is parallel to the blade each time you use it. With the older fences, you need to do this anyway. But if you have a belt drive, cast iron table saw, it is worth your time and money to completely realign it and replace the old fence with a modern one.

If you are trying to use the saw for ripping, maybe you should check out a table saw as Craftsman radial arm saws are a little under par for that job in my opinion.

Neither one of mine owes me anything as we have abused them for a long time. Once the power minter boxes came out and the lion trimers were purchased we kind of got away from the radial arm saws.

I should add that if you follow the owners manual on squaring the saw, it will indeed be perfect.

I did try one round of the glued together motor deals from Craftsman, and will turn into a serial killer if I ever go through that ordeal again.

However before doing this is your fence square with the table ? This needs to be done before aligning the blade with the fence.
both need to be square for everything to work right.