Dolph Brostrom

Dolph Brostrom was born in 1921 in Newcastle, Australia, and moved to America soon thereafter, growing up in the SF Bay Area. Following high school, while working in the shipyards and taking college courses, Dolph found his life was forever impacted by the attack on Pearl Harbor. His first book, a memoir called “One Sailor’s Journey: Tales from WWII,” chronicles how that attack changed his life, not only in the Bay Area leading up to his U.S. Navy enlistment, but during training in San Diego and, within a few months, setting up shop at the Ship Repair AD 40 unit on Īle Nou in New Caledonia. Woven throughout his memoir are happy, sad, informative, touching, and funny stories of how the war affected everyone’s lives in so many ways. Melodies of the Big Band era are mentioned throughout the book, and there are many nostalgic photographs included that capture the essence of the times. A welcome, but unexpected R&R break in Australia tells about its people during the mid-1940s. When the war was over, Dolph joined the Fire Department in Oakland, California where he worked for 27 years. His fire department career was interrupted when he was recalled to active duty and sent overseas for the Korean War, which serves as the subject for the book he is currently writing. An expanded edition of “One Sailor’s Journey” was published in June 2014. He now lives in Temecula, California with his wife, and family nearby.