Bruce A. Dobish was inside the World Trade Center in 1993 when a bomb detonated in the parking garage below. Eight years later, he stood directly across the street when the first plane struck on September 11, 2001. He ran, nearly got trampled, and made it home. That experience appears not at the beginning of his new memoir, but in Chapter 14—a testament to a life that, as the title suggests, refused to stay ordinary.
It Could Happen to You is Dobish’s account of six decades of American life, told without polish or pretense. The book moves through a Queens childhood in the projects, a shot at Brooklyn Tech, a paper route that became a hustle, poker tables and Grateful Dead shows, three marriages, a multimillion-dollar phone distribution venture, and a DNA test that revealed a sister he never knew existed. It also details a fall on a cruise-ship gangway that nearly ended everything—and led to the hospital bed from which the book was written.
Dobish did not sit at a desk to compose his memoir. Recovering from a fractured hip, immobilized in a rehabilitation facility, he used his phone as his only tool. He dictated roughly 7,000 lines between physical therapy sessions and hospital meals. “I’ve always wanted to write a book, and I was sick in the hospital, rehabbing,” Dobish 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, with the recovery itself becoming one of its final chapters.
The narrative is not a warning but an invitation, as Dobish explains: “The title says it all. It could happen to you. It happened to me.” The book chronicles his time as a teenager working at the New York Daily News before he was legally old enough, a college parking-pass scheme that could have been a business school case study, and an entrepreneur’s rise and fall in the telecommunications industry. Along the way, he found himself adjacent to history—the 1993 bombing, 9/11, and the 2003 blackout that darkened the Northeast. A darker current runs underneath as well: two men he counted as friends were convicted of murder and died in prison. “I’ve been through a lot,” he said. “I think it’s real life. People will relate to that.”
The memoir targets readers who prefer true stories over invented ones—fans of blue-collar New York memoirs, survivors’ accounts of 9/11, and anyone who finishes a book and immediately hands it to someone else. It will resonate 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. For a broad audience, the book’s significance lies in its unvarnished portrayal of resilience and the unexpected ways a life can be rebuilt.
Bruce A. 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. A lifelong New York sports fan—Jets, Rangers, Knicks, Mets—he has held season tickets through more heartbreak than he cares to itemize. He lives in Florida with his wife, Lydia. He has two daughters and four grandchildren. It Could Happen to You is his first book.
