Bruce A. Dobish was inside the World Trade Center in 1993 when a bomb exploded in the garage below. Eight years later, he stood across the street when the first plane struck. He ran, nearly got trampled, and made it home. 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, and its publication matters because it captures six decades of American life through the eyes of someone who repeatedly stood next to history.
The title is not a warning but an invitation. "The title says it all," Dobish said. "It could happen to you. It happened to me." Dobish's story begins in a Queens childhood in the projects, includes a shot at Brooklyn Tech, a paper route that turned into a hustle, poker tables and Grateful Dead shows, three marriages, a multimillion-dollar phone venture, and a sister he did not know existed until a DNA test found her. A fall on a cruise-ship gangway nearly ended everything, leading to the rehabilitation bed where the book took shape.
Dobish did not write at a desk. Recovering from a fractured hip and immobilized in a rehabilitation facility, he used a phone as his only tool, dictating 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," 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. This method of composition adds a layer of urgency and authenticity, showing that storytelling can emerge from the most constrained circumstances.
The book moves through six decades of American life the way memory actually works: funny one page, dangerous the next. Readers meet the kid who struggled to read and 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, the husband three times over, and the entrepreneur who built a phone distribution operation with thousands of agents before watching other ventures fall apart. Dobish also 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: 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 is written for readers who gravitate toward true stories over invented ones—fans of blue-collar New York memoir, survivors' accounts of 9/11, and the kind of book a reader finishes and immediately hands to someone else. 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. By dictating his story from a rehab bed, Dobish demonstrates that resilience is not just a theme of his life but the very method of its telling.
