Michael “Mike” Thomas Anderson was still preparing clients’ taxes at the end of his life, in the upstairs office his older sister, Margie, had spent years begging him to move downstairs. His younger brother, Pat, drove over every day to check on him, no doubt in part due to Pat’s wife, Marsha, who was doing her best to keep them both alive. If Mike was upstairs, Pat hollered for him to stay put. The stairs were steep, and Pat was not climbing them either.
Pat kept at it until his own death in March 2026. Mike carried on four months longer, determined to make his 6 a.m. dialysis appointments, until he died on July 27, 2026, at age 74, at home in Hudson, Wyoming, with work still on his desk.
Mike was born December 3, 1951, in Lander to Alfred and Margaret (Detloff) Anderson. He spent his first years in Fort Washakie on the Wind River Indian Reservation, where the family had little. In 1961, when Mike was ten, they moved to Hudson, ordered a house from a catalog, and lived in a trailer while they built it with their own hands, until it was finished in 1967. It was home for the rest of his life.
He graduated from Lander Valley High School in 1969, in the first class to finish under that name — it had been Fremont County Vocational High School until his senior year. From there he attended the University of Wyoming, later transferring to Brigham Young University, where he earned his accounting degree and a lifelong loyalty to the Cougars. While working in the BYU athletic department, he once got to meet his hero, coach LaVell Edwards. He paid his way through school by changing oil at the Exxon station. He and his college roommate shared an apartment whose roof leaked the entire time they lived under it, and when they couldn’t afford toilet paper — which was often — they requisitioned it from the BYU dorms. He loved to yuck it up about those days for the rest of his life.
After moving back to Wyoming, he met his future wife, Saundra, at the local LDS church in Lander. She was a University of Utah graduate who was just as passionate about her Utes as he was his Cougars. The wedding was January 5, 1980, in the Salt Lake City Temple, and they were together forty-three years, until her death in 2023. A devoted member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Mike served his ward as bishop from 1994 to 1999. He carried his faith quietly, mostly by accepting the work in front of him and doing it.
Their son, Matt, was born in 1987. He and Saundra loved a night out, especially a concert or a Utah football game, and Mike liked to remind them both that a whole concert’s worth of songs could be had on a $15 CD, and that the game looked better, for free, from the couch. He teased Saundra for years about her big spending. The charge was ridiculous, and he knew it: this was a woman who saved grocery sacks rather than buy garbage bags, brought home the jelly packets from restaurants, and collected the miniature shampoo, lotion, and conditioner bottles from every hotel they stayed at. All that commentary eventually caught up with him. When Saundra won free front-row tickets to James Taylor and Carole King, she chose Matt for the seat beside her, and Mike watched the show from the nosebleeds.
Mike earned his CPA license in Wyoming and started out as an auditor, once climbing to the top of a workover rig to check a figure for himself. He spent years at Riverton Memorial Hospital, ran his own CPA practice, and later made a career of being sent into struggling hospitals as their interim chief financial officer, and then chief executive, to turn them around, from Seattle and Portland to St. Maries, Idaho, and Natchez, Mississippi. Of all the places his work took him, the South was his favorite. He loved the deep history and the people, and he could rarely pass a battlefield without stopping. He came home with a taste for grits and a beat-up Chevy Suburban he loved dearly, over Saundra’s strenuous and frequently voiced objections. The marriage held.
Even though Mike enjoyed his life on the road as a “hired gun,” Hudson was always home. He served about six years on the town council, sat on the board of the Wind River Visitors Council, and was mayor from 2014 to 2022. He kept the flood barriers up, stretched a shrinking budget, and paved every street in Hudson but three. His politics were those of an old-school conservative: careful with money, decent to people, no use for showboats. Asked in 2022 why he wanted a third term, he said he meant to finish what he’d started: the flood funding, and the half-cent tax that would pave the last three streets. Then he added, “The people are good people here in town.”
When the lot behind the house came up for sale, Mike jumped at the chance to buy it. Saundra was not a fan of the decision, and it became the one time she would have had to admit she was wrong. Mike rented it first to his niece Troy and later to his nephew Jade while each looked for something more permanent, and both times, a relative the Andersons had hardly known moved in a hundred feet away and truly became family.
Later in life he fell in with Dennis Vinson, Lanny Cole, and Paul Smith, three men every bit as devoted to BYU as he was. Matt came along on some of their outings to keep an eye on things. “Buckle up, Matt,” Mike told him. “You’re rolling with the big dogs now.” They had flown into Chicago with time to kill before the Cougars played Notre Dame in South Bend when they caught wind of a nephrite boulder at the Field Museum — a ton and a quarter of Wyoming jade pulled from the ground near Lander, a long way from home. In their hurry to reach it, the big dogs ducked under the stanchion rope for a more direct route. An attendant informed them, gently but firmly, that the rope was there for a reason and that they could go around like everybody else.
In the years after Saundra’s death, it was a feisty gray cat that kept Mike in line. The Andersons had always been a one-dog family, and Mike never wanted a damn cat. Then one year, after the family dog Max died, Saundra brought home a kitten. After the obligatory shouting match, Mike started to warm up to the cat as he realized it was every bit as bullheaded as he was. Mike lobbied to name it Cosmo, after the BYU mascot. Saundra, a University of Utah fan, vetoed that nonsense promptly, and the cat went by Catty. After Saundra died, Mike finally won the argument. Catty became Goonhead, and Goonhead became his best friend and his favorite subject of conversation. If the cat wanted the recliner, Mike took the floor. Lights went out at ten, because ten was when the cat went to bed.
As a boy, Mike made trips to visit his cousins in Bisbee, Arizona, and the old mining town kept its hold on him all his life. The winter after Saundra died, he and Matt made the long drive down together. Mike wasn’t the type who said “I love you” often, but he called his son nearly every day of Matt’s adult life. If the first call went unanswered, he called again until it wasn’t.
Mike was preceded in death by his parents, Alfred and Margaret Anderson; his wife, Saundra; and his brothers, Patrick “Pat” Anderson, Hayes “Fuzz” Parten, and Jarrett “Dogie” Parten. He is survived by his son, Matt; his sister, Marjorie “Margie” Wood; his sister-in-law, Marsha Anderson; his brother-in-law, Terry Carlston; and many other relatives and friends.
A funeral service will be held at 1:00 p.m. on Friday, August 28, 2026, at The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, 653 Cascade Street, Lander, with a visitation from noon to 12:45 p.m. In lieu of flowers, the family suggests donations to the American Cancer Society’s Hope Lodge in Salt Lake City, which gave Saundra a place to stay during her cancer treatment.
The house his family built is still standing. The streets of Hudson are paved. Goonhead has moved on to keeping Matt in line. And somewhere Pat is hollering up the stairs at Mike, telling him to stay put. Mike, of course, is already halfway down.
