When You Find Yourself In A Remote Swedish Mining Town...

...you’re going to want to find a raggare club and slow-roll in their classic American iron.

- Josh Dean

THE DRIVING AGE IN SWEDEN IS 18, and as that magical number approached, Nicklas Holmgren accepted that his first car would be a Volvo, because of course it would be. But he pined for something big and bad and born in Detroit, preferably before he was. So in 1990, at 19, as soon as he’d saved enough money, he drove 210 miles from his home in Kiruna to the nearest big city, Luleå, and bought a 1970 Oldsmobile Cutlass. Now 47, Holmgren says his attraction to the car hit him “like a bolt of lightning on a clear day.”

Holmgren’s obsession with American cars may not be normal, but neither is it uncommon. On a summer afternoon in the center of most any working-class town in Sweden, parades of Cadillacs and Oldsmobiles and Plymouths course through the streets, driven by men sporting leather jackets and slicked hair. The culture has a name—raggare, typically translated as “greaser” but derived from a verb meaning “to pick up girls”—and it’s turned Sweden into an unlikely museum of American cruising culture.

Holmgren’s current ride, a metallic-blue 1967 Cadillac DeVille, is parked outside the headquarters of the Midnight Sun Cruisers (MSC), the raggare club he co-founded in 1989. The clubhouse is a two-story brick building across the street from Kiruna’s ski hill. The original idea was to have a place where Holmgren and his friends could rebuild engines, drink beer, and complain about work. Within a year, there were 20 members. Today, there are 90.

Most of the members, then and now, work at Kiirunavaara, a mountain in Kiruna that contains the largest underground ironore mine on earth. Since its founding in 1898, the mine has produced more than 900 million tons of high-quality magnetite. “No mine, no Kiruna,” Holmgren says.