How do I go about getting rid of the unwanted noise, scratches, and cracks that are transferred onto the audacity program from my, well, noisy, scratchy, and crackling tapes and records?
Thank you for your help in this matter.
Ron
http://manual.audacityteam.org/o/man/basic_recording_editing_and_exporting.html
This is part of the Basic Editing tutorial.
Post Production patches and filters are never perfect, so you are urged to do the transfer as perfect and as high a quality as possible
Koz
If the noise is bad, sometimes "the cure can be worse than the disease". 
For tapes where there is a relatively constant background hiss, try the [u]Noise Removal[/u] effect, which uses a sample of noise-only as a noise profile (AKA a “noise fingerprint”).
For vinyl noise, try the Click Removal effect. You can also zoom-in on the clicks and manually re-draw the waveform.
Or there are special-purpose vinyl clean-up applications. [u]This Page[/u] lists several applications for cleaning-up vinyl, along with tons of other helpful information. I use Wave Repair ($30 USD) which does an amazing job on most vinyl defects in the manual mode where it only “touches” the sound where you identify a defect. But, it’s very time consuming.
Or, my first advice is buy the CD or download the MP3 if it’s available. 
When I transcribed my LPs I used Brian Davies’ ClickRepair - it cost a little but was well worth it to me as I had hundreds of LPs to work on. The results were just a liitle shy of magical - see this sticky thread: https://forum.audacityteam.org/t/click-pop-removal-clickrepair-software/1933/1
WC
Wow, thank you soooo much, Kozikowski, DVD Doug, and Waxcylinder for your help. It is really, really appreciated!
Ron