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Screven county is mostly quiet, farming country. The drive in from neighboring Statesboro on Ga. 17 is serene; just fields, a country church or two, a herd of black and white goats grazing in a green pasture. So there is little to prepare you for the impact of meeting Greta Newton, chief executive of a tiny but growing engineering and design firm called Rocky Ford International. She comes at you with the force of the Norfolk Southern train that runs through the town of Rocky Ford, from whence the company got its name, on track laid less than 100 feet from her office door.
"I was born breech, blue and dead," says this tall, striking woman in her early 40s, with brown-black hair and olive-colored eyes, by way of beginning the tale of how all this came about. She has been engaged in the relentless defiance of probability ever since.
"When somebody tells me something can't be done, I say 'Thank you. Now get the hell out of my way so I can go do it myself," Greta says in the native South Georgia drawl she got from growing up a "barefooted yard child" on land her family has farmed for generations. And she does. For instance, she was told by construction material suppliers that she and her husband, engineer Charles Brunken, could not possibly erect a $28.5 million, 402-room hotel, built out of steel, on a former cattle ranch along an isolated stretch of the Costa Rican coast in the approximately 10-month time span that they had for construction. But they did. The Playa Tambor opened in November 1992, a month ahead of schedule, as the largest hotel in Costa Rica.
The hotel, which was completely booked before it opened and has been operating at close to capacity ever since, is owned by the Barcelo Group, a Spanish developer with revenue of more than $500 million and owner of 34 hotels.
Clients and other people the couple does business with have also questioned the logic of trying to run a growing international engineering, design and consulting firm from a dot-sized town like Rocky Ford (67 registered voters), located about 70 miles southeast of Augusta and 20 miles north of Statesboro, and a good 45...