AKRON, Ohio — When he comes back to Akron, he comes back to Swenson’s.

Sometimes, he makes it his first stop. For 84 years they’ve been selling burgers, now in 10 locations from Cleveland to Columbus. But, like LeBron James himself, Swenson’s started here.

You park outside and wait for one of the hard-sprinting kids to come to your window with a menu and a tray. James and his guys have been known to pull up in an SUV or a Hummer, and when the window rolls down and that unmistakable face smiles, the running waiter is very impressed. He is even more impressed when James drops a $100 tip.

There was much written about James’ “homecoming” in 2014. He was coming to Cleveland, which is about 40 miles north. It was the home of the NBA team with which Akron identified, but it was not home. Now James has left Cleveland twice. He returns Wednesday night with the Lakers.

The first time James left was in 2010. Jersey-burnings were the symbols of Cleveland’s outrage, based on a sense of betrayal.

But Akron was not angry. Maybe it was a little disappointed by the ponderous exit strategy, by “The Decision” show on ESPN that led to the move to Miami that most people felt was predestined in James’ mind. That disappointment passed.

“LeBron left the team that plays in Cleveland,” said Robert Brownfield, the principal at St. Vincent-St. Mary, where James studied and played. “He never left us.”

RUBBER MEETS ROAD

Akron tells a familiar, Great Lakes story.

It thrived on the backs of its laborers, on the locals and the migrants from West Virginia and Kentucky, and the immigrants from Hungary and what was known as Yugoslavia. It leaned on the family-run tire companies: B.F. Goodrich, Firestone, Goodyear, General Tire. With union protection, you could punch the same clock in the same company all your working life.

From 1910 to 1920 Akron’s population grew from 69,000 to 210,000 and eventually reached 290,000. It was down to 172,000 in 2010. Every major tire company but Goodyear had shut down by the early 1990s, and 47,000 rubber-related jobs have disappeared since World War II.

Akron native Chrissie Hynde wailed on the radio: “I went back to Ohio/But my city was gone/There was no train station/There was no downtown.”

Akron has tried a reset. It has concentrated on hospitals, higher education and polymer research, and has whittled its unemployment rate to 4 percent. There is noticeable money in a new downtown, with a good-looking minor league ballpark (the Rubber Ducks), coffee shops and restaurants like the “Akron-nym.”

Meanwhile, fifteen public schools in Akron now carry Naloxone in stock, for those who suffer overdoses.

Some places feel like home and some don’t. Some are distinctive, some aren’t. Akron is the home of Gus Johnson, the NBA’s first true power forward, who had a gold star set into one of his front teeth. It produced Hynde and Devo and the Black Keys and Jim Jarmusch, who directed movies not meant for the masses.

Patrick Carney of the Black Keys was asked about his vision and said, “I want people to like our music, but I don’t want to make music we know they’re gonna like just to make music we know they’re gonna like.”

He also said how disgusting it was to go to Berlin and see a Subway.

Then there is Derby Downs on the south side of town, home of the All-American Soap Box Derby, a piece of Americana that used to be a feature of “Wide World of Sports.” Some kids actually put down their earphones and build vehicles, it seems. The Derby stubbornly lives on, in Akron.

There are the rows of houses with impressive gables, some occupied, some not. There is the sign that towers above downtown; “Nothing Is Given. Everything Is Earned. You Work For What You Have.”

There is the signboard outside a clinic that lists the number of opioid deaths in Summit County for the year. On a mid-August afternoon, it said “583.”

Directly across the street is a stately building that once housed a bank. Today it is the I Promise School, founded by LeBron James.

CHANCES HE DIDN’T HAVE

Today’s basketball gods are polarizing in a way Oscar Robertson and Jerry West never were. Those who find fault with James might consider the 0-and-2 count that his life dealt him.

His fatherless childhood was a cycle of different homes, different bedrooms, different logistical problems every day. He missed 83 days of school one year. He couldn’t unpack, not until he moved in with Frank Walker, a youth coach who with his wife Pam put LeBron on a controlled schedule.

Then James landed on a Slam magazine cover as a high school sophomore and a Sports Illustrated cover as a junior at St. Vincent-St. Mary. He was the most famous high school athlete in America and one of the most famous basketball players, as an 18-year-old.

First, there was no way up. Then there was nowhere to go but down. Somehow James found his own ways to establish his own footing. He’s from Akron.

The kids at I Promise are given computers, but also bicycles, because James was helpless for transportation so often. If there is a problem with truancy, the school rings the house and James’ recorded message cajoles the kid back to school.

“We all think this will change the way we educate,” said Susan Kushner Benson, an associate professor at the University of Akron.

One of James’ promises is to pay the freight at Akron for any I Promise student who graduates from high school. Third and fourth graders began this year, and by 2022 the school will be fully stocked, one through eight.

Students who are lagging behind are targeted for I Promise. The school day is eight hours. There are 20 students per class, and there are no traditional rows of desks. Teachers and counselors go classroom to classroom.

“There’s an openness that you rarely see,” Benson said. “Kids have challenges, sitting for eight hours. The staff had a challenge with one student and finally told him, ‘You’re not leaving. We don’t do suspensions here.’”

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Three keys for the Lakers to hold off the Nuggets after Game 3 loss But I Promise educates parents, too. There is a food bank at the school, there is a connection to a GED program, and the staff was “blown away,” Benson said, when a parent from every family attended the first open house.

This is a partnership between the Foundation and the Akron Public Schools. It is not a charter school. The University of Akron is also public, and there will be a resource center on campus for the I Promise kids.

“College can be intimidating for anyone,” Benson said. “Now imagine if you’ve never had anyone in your family go to college before.

“Kids can go through this program and say, ‘I see myself as a college student. What do I need to do to get there?’ This is why nobody here doubts Lebron’s genuineness. He’s never seen himself as anything but an Akron kid.”

And when you look at the Foundation sponsors, Swenson’s is right on the list. Life is not a drive-thru, not in Akron.