When the United States entered World War I in the spring of 1917, Julius Dittmaier, the 21-year-old son of a German immigrant, and George Brosch, the 18-year-old son of Bohemian immigrants, faced the prospect of serving in an American Army fighting Germany and Austria, even though they could have been shooting at their own cousins among the young German and Bohemian draftees. Both served as American doughboys and survived a war that left tens of thousands of young men dead on the battlefields of Europe. They returned to America, found work, and started families, and by 1929 they were neighbors on Cherokee Street. Julius Dittmaier supported his family as a stock clerk, private watchman, and maintenance man while renting the upstairs flat of a town house, and George Brosch, a baker, lived with his wife in a second-floor flat at 1909 Cherokee for $20 a month. The two World War I veterans remained neighbors on Cherokee Street through the Great Depression and were still living there on December 7, 1941, when the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor brought the United States into World War II.
