Bruce A. Dobish was inside the World Trade Center in 1993 when a bomb exploded in the garage below. Eight years later, he stood directly across the street when the first plane hit on September 11, 2001. He ran, nearly got trampled, and made it home. But that is not the opening of his new memoir. It is Chapter 14.
The book, It Could Happen to You, is Dobish’s account of a life that refused to stay ordinary. It moves through six decades of American life, from a Queens childhood in the projects and a shot at Brooklyn Tech to a paper route that turned into a hustle, poker tables and Grateful Dead shows, three marriages, a multimillion-dollar phone venture, a sister he did not know existed until a DNA test found her, and a fall on a cruise-ship gangway that nearly ended everything.
The title is not a warning. It is an invitation. “The title says it all,” Dobish said. “It could happen to you. It happened to me.”
What makes the book unusual is how it was written. Dobish did not sit at a desk. He was recovering from a fractured hip, immobilized in a rehabilitation facility, with a phone as his only tool. So he talked into it, producing roughly 7,000 lines of dictation recorded between physical therapy sessions and hospital meals. “I’ve always wanted to write a book, and I was sick in the hospital, rehabbing,” he said. “I figured it was a good time to start. All I had was my phone.” What began as a way to pass the hours became a full-length memoir, and the recovery itself became one of its final chapters.
The narrative unfolds the way memory actually works: funny one page, dangerous the next. Readers meet the kid who struggled to read but tested into a gifted program, the teenager who worked at the New York Daily News before he was legally old enough, the college student who ran a parking-pass scheme that would have made a better business school case study than most textbooks, the husband three times over, and the entrepreneur who built a phone distribution operation with thousands of agents before watching other ventures fall apart. Along the way, Dobish kept finding himself standing next to history: the 1993 bombing, September 11, and the 2003 blackout that dropped the Northeast into darkness.
A darker current runs underneath. Dobish grew up and did business around people whose choices took them somewhere he never went. Two men he counted as friends were convicted of murder and both died in prison. “I’ve been through a lot,” he said. “I think it’s real life. People will relate to that.”
The memoir is written for readers who gravitate toward true stories over invented ones, including fans of blue-collar New York memoir and survivors’ accounts of 9/11. It will resonate particularly with baby boomers who lived the same decades from a different seat, with New Yorkers past and present, and with anyone in the middle of a hard recovery who needs proof that a life is not over just because the body is temporarily out of service.
Dobish was born in Manhattan and raised in Queens, in Electchester, Flushing, and Kew Gardens Hills. He attended Brooklyn Technical High School and Queens College, and spent his career in sales, distribution, and entrepreneurship, including a large-scale telecommunications venture. He lives in Florida with his wife, Lydia, and has two daughters and four grandchildren. It Could Happen to You is his first book.
