Cruncher and the Ghost

Cruncher gets a Boo! Boo

Be on the lookout for: Cruncher is the Ghost?

A very long time ago a teenage boy moved to Tacoma, Washington where he attended Stadium High School as a sophomore. The house he was living in was off 6th Ave, and it was very old. There was only one room upstairs, but it was rather large and had many cubby holes built into the walls. As such, it was rather unique, and it was a great bedroom for a teenager. 

The problem is it wasn't a good place to sleep. The teenager would wake up in the middle of the night almost every night thinking somebody was sneaking around in his room. He could actually hear a person's footsteps and the floor squeaking with each step.

Needless to say, it was very frightening, but the teenager could not just lie there waiting to be murdered. He would jump up, turn on the lights, and search the whole house looking for an intruder. He even crawled all through the cubby holes, but he never found any persons hiding in the house. Stranger still, the doors and windows were always still locked. In the morning he always felt stupid.

Then one night the teenager abruptly awoke and opened his eyes. A man was standing no more than a foot away, looking down at him! This man was wearing a plaid shirt of the type you'd expect to see on lumberjacks, but that was of no comfort. It certainly didn't prove the intruder was friendly.

The teenager had never been so badly scared before, and he was positive he was about to be murdered.

Unfortunately, the fear was also so incapacitating he couldn't even move for a while, and, under this paralyzing condition, there was no way he could have avoided being killed.

Fortunately, however, it turned out the man standing there wasn't a murderer after all. Even so, nobody may ever know who he was or what he wanted. The man in the plaid shirt never said a word. He stood there long enough to convince the teenager it wasn't just his imagination, but eventually the man did slowly disappear.

Once the teenager had settled down he did his standard check of the house, but, as usual, he could not find a thing.

The young man never told anybody about the nightly intrusions until the night he graduated high school. On that night his mother told him she had never expected him to graduate because of all the school he had missed. This seemed an odd thing to say because the teenager had missed no more than two days of school a year, and he said so.

His mother's response told the story. "Listen, kiddo, I know how often you skipped school because I don't go to work until two hours after you leave, and I could always tell when you snuck back into the house. I'd be eating breakfast at the downstairs table, and I could clearly hear you clunking around up there in your big, old boots walking up and down the floor."

The teenager simply said, "Ma, it wasn't me you were hearing" and then he told her about the ghost.

Some years later this young man was in the military, and he woke up one Saturday morning thinking about that ghost. He started wondering if the ghost wanted something, and then he wondered what would have happened if the ghost had actually talked to him. That was when the ideas started flowing. The next thing he knew he was sitting at a table writing ideas down on paper as fast as he could with a pencil (This young man had not yet learned how to type, and personal computers were a few years off in the future). He spent that whole weekend writing down ideas, and, when he was done, Joe Cruncher was ready to take on the world.

Joe Cruncher lives during the 1960's. Many of the things he does and experiences may not seem possible in today's world, but they were entirely possible and/or legal back then. In his time newspapers were not delivered by adults; they were mostly delivered by kids on bicycles, and nobody in those days even considered wearing a helmet while riding a bike. Moreover, children didn't just deliver newspapers; they were allowed to perform a wide variety of jobs - for pay - even before age 12. There was no law saying they had to be at least 16.

Ever hear about the dangers of second-hand smoke? These kids were raised on it. Almost every home had a smoker in it, but even when the kids were raised in a smoke free home there was still no such thing as a 'smoke free' environment. Grown-ups smoked in cars, on the street, in restaurants, on planes, in their workplaces, and even in movie theaters. Now, nobody smokes anything in a Cruncher book at all, but the point remains - this generation of kids lived in a very different world from the one the reader may know.

Another thing that might mystify modern kids is the abundance of toy guns back then. Everywhere across the country thousands and thousands of kids ran around shooting cap guns without orange tips on the end. There was even one series of toy guns, the Johnny Eagle guns, that were so realistic you could barely tell the difference between them and the real thing. Believe it or not, getting shot by the police while carrying a cap gun was almost unheard of. Truth is, there are far more television dramas depicting such rare events than ever actually happened in real life. Go to Youtube and check out advertisements for Mattel cap guns, Agent Zero M, and OMA (One Man Army) - you will see toys being sold that are unheard of today.

Children were also allowed to walk long distances to stores, all by themselves, while still very young, and then those children were allowed to buy items they cannot purchase today - even things considered dangerous. Among those items were hazardous chemicals, super-slingshots, BB-guns, black powder, .22 caliber bullets and even some firearms. (In the case of firearms and ammo what restrictions there were depended upon age and location. Yet even the age restrictions then were lower than today). Many of these items were allowed in schools and nobody worried about it too much. Despite that fact, school shootings or other type large scale attacks simply did not occur.

With all that said, there is no comparison in any Cruncher book between these two worlds to make you believe one is better than the other; all you need to understand is Joe Cruncher's America was very different from today. The stuff you may read that seems odd is in fact accurate. Things concerning rock salt, sling shots, cap guns, speed limits, and prices paid for goods and services are all correct for the 1960's. 

The names of Hollywood tough-guys are also accurate for the times. If you are unfamiliar with Humphrey Bogart, James Cagney, Edward G. Robinson or John Wayne you can easily find clips of them on the interenet.