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. He ran, nearly got trampled, and made it home. Those experiences appear in Chapter 14 of his new memoir, It Could Happen to You, which was released on October 16, 2026.
The book is not solely about those attacks. It chronicles a life that refused to stay ordinary: a Queens childhood in the projects, 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, 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, Dobish says, is not a warning but an invitation. "The title says it all," he 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. While recovering from a fractured hip and immobilized in a rehabilitation facility, he used only a phone. 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," 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 his recovery itself became one of its final chapters.
It Could Happen to You 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 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 aimed at readers who prefer true stories over invented ones, including fans of blue-collar New York memoir and survivors' accounts of 9/11. It may 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.
For the business world, Dobish's story underscores how entrepreneurial ventures can rise and fall, and how resilience often matters more than a single success. His phone distribution operation with thousands of agents shows the scale a determined founder can reach, while his subsequent setbacks illustrate the volatility that comes with risk-taking. The fact that he produced a full memoir using only a phone while immobilized also highlights how technology can enable productivity even in the most constrained circumstances. Dobish, who lives in Florida with his wife, Lydia, has two daughters and four grandchildren. It Could Happen to You is his first book.
