GILLETTE - As much as he was anything else - a father, grandfather, loving companion, card-player and good friend - Andrew Anderson was a gardener.

He kept his yard trimmed, his flowers blooming.

Sometimes, while mowing his grass, he took the mower next door when a neighbor's yard looked too shaggy.

People used the word "immaculate" and it fit Anderson's property perfectly, with its flower pots and cucumbers, petunias and tomatoes.

During the height of the growing season, he watered his plants three or four times a day.

No one knows for sure, but those who love him suspect it was during one of those times, watering his garden in the cool dusk or quiet dawn, that a mosquito carrying West Nile virus bit "Andy" Anderson.

He was a tease and a fisherman, a hunter and a traveler. He devoted himself to his children and grandchildren, to his friends, his late wife and his special companion.

"He taught me the value of hard work. And how to care for others," said his eldest son, Craig Anderson of Cheyenne.

Andy's children - Craig, Arlyn Anderson of Hulett, Linda Welch of Pompeys Pillar, Mont., and Monte Anderson of Gillette - and his companion, Betty Moorhead, talked about Andy this week in between family memorials and funeral services.

As they grapple with the suddenness of the disease's onset and of his death, the family looks back at Andy's life with pride and admiration. He was the man who taught his children to love and be loved, to help a friend and the value of hard work. He taught them to tend a tidy garden.

In 1965, Anderson moved his wife, Lillian, and his children to Gillette from Sidney, Mont. Almost immediately he began making lifelong friends.

When he became part owner of the Montgomery Bar in 1966, he became a staple at the corner bar on Gillette Avenue. Soon, people came to know the bar as Andy's Montgomery Bar.

When someone walked in, they met a friend in Andy. He worked mornings and often played cribbage from behind the bar. Every day at 2 p.m., his friends met him there and they played pinochle at the tables in the back.

He always appreciated that the bar did not change, even as the crowds did.

As a father, he always provided for his family, even when there wasn't a lot of money. At one time he helped support four kids in college.

His family grew up in the same small home on East Ninth Street. Anderson lived there until his death.

The boys - Craig, Monte and Arlyn - shared one room while the only girl, Linda, got her own.

Anderson never missed his children's activities - in town or out. Craig remembers one instance when his dad insisted he be discharged from a Denver hospital in time to see Monte play a basketball game in Cheyenne.

He was fighting throat cancer, developed after years of breathing in second-hand smoke at the Montgomery.

Later, when his children had grown, he doted over his nine grandchildren and, even later, his four great-grandchildren.

He loved babies and wasn't afraid to hold them - unless they had a dirty diaper.

He loved traveling, hunting and fishing. He especially enjoyed fishing, especially if he could do it while traveling.

He caught the marlin mounted over the Montgomery's shuffle puck table in Mazatln, Mexico. And he was always the first to rise when he and his friends went fishing in Alaska or Canada.

He was impossibly stubborn when it came to going to the doctor, but was quick to suggest someone else should go.

And, it was Andy who brought the family together on Thanksgiving, insisting that his children, and their children and their children, come to his house for that day.

"There were 30 people in this house, talking and playing cards," Linda said.

Maybe more than anything else, Andy was a caregiver.

Even when Lillian's Alzheimer's had gotten bad, he kept her with him. He often slept on a mattress in the living room where he would know if she was getting into something she shouldn't.

Lillian suffered a long time, her children say, until her death in 1991. But Andy was always by her side.

He did the same for a friend in Sidney who had been confined to a wheelchair. Andy visited three times a week to shave him, groom him or just to talk. In Gillette, he befriended a man who lost both legs. Andy drove him back and forth to hospitals in South Dakota.

He met Betty Moorhead in the Montgomery when she and a girlfriend stopped in.

He was kind, considerate and would do anything for you. He was simply a beautiful person, Moorhead thought.

The two formed a special bond. They went on fishing trips and to Minnesota to visit Andy's family.

They were always going somewhere together, Moorhead said.

When Moorhead's stroke put her in a wheelchair, Andy picked her up each weekend. They'd go out to eat and watch television together at Andy's house.

"It just meant the world to me. I couldn't hardly wait for Friday nights when he would pick me up," said Moorhead, 80.

But when the virus struck, it was Andy who needed to be cared for.

Monte walked into his childhood home on Sept. 2 to find his dad sitting at the table. He was sweating and disoriented.

He couldn't tie his own shoe.

"We're going to the doctor," Monte said.

"No, no," Andy protested. "I already got an appointment with a doctor for blood work."

"We're going right now," Monte said.

Monte took Andy to the Campbell County Memorial Hospital emergency room. Andy insisted that he walk in and refused a wheelchair.

Andy talked to Monte that night. By the next morning, he had slipped into a coma.

"West Nile virus," doctors told the family.

He was intubated and put on a respirator. That later was replaced by a trachea tube.

Anderson wasn't expected to come out of the coma.

The virus had caused Andy to contract encephalitis, a swelling in the brain. While his weakened system fought off the virus, his body suffered two bouts of pneumonia, a staphylococcus infection and a host of other complications.

But on Sept. 26, Andy surprised doctors by waking up. He could focus on his children's faces, though they had to be gowned and masked when they visited him.

He could move his arms in a deliberate manner, instead of the involuntary movements caused by reflexes.

Doctors even weaned him off the trachea tube, which had helped him breathe. They started therapy and Andy eventually was able to move from his bed to his wheelchair - with a little help. He teased, told funny stories, and slowly began to seem more like himself.

On Halloween, dressed in a hospital gown and mask with a smiley face drawn on it, Andy handed out candy to children in the hospital's day care.

But the area where his trachea tube had been continued to constrict. He'd had one before when he battled throat cancer and doctors believe the scar tissue interfered with this one.

Though doctors say Andy had fought off the virus itself, the effects of treating the symptoms eventually killed him.

At age 76, he died Nov. 16 at Campbell County Memorial Hospital of complications of West Nile virus.

Though his children don't question the care Andy got at CCMH - indeed they said the care was wonderful - they do wonder why there is a vaccine to protect horses but there is no vaccine for people.

As a boy, Monte would let a mosquito land on his arm and drink its fill before squashing it flat.

Now, it's hard to imagine that the same tiny bug could do so much harm.

But Andy's friends and family won't quit living. This Thanksgiving, the family will gather in Andy's house just as they always have. No mosquito can change that.

"I don't think there is a lesson to be learned," Craig said, who golfs even though their may be mosquitos breeding in the ponds. "You've still got to go out and play golf. You've still got to mow the lawn."

"You have to live life no matter what," Linda added.

Andy would have agreed.

And, if things had turned out differently, he would have spent this fall blowing leaves from his garden just as he had always done.