On the night of November 1, 2026, The Lettermen were finishing a weekend engagement in Las Vegas when word reached them that the man who started the group was gone. Tony Butala, the founding voice of the harmony trio behind "The Way You Look Tonight" and "When I Fall in Love," died that day in Manitowoc, Wisconsin. He was 87.

At the end of the show, the singers who now carry the name held a moment of tribute, and some in the audience had not yet heard the news. Las Vegas was also where, decades earlier, Butala had first imagined the cause he would chase for decades: a hall of honor for the vocal groups whose records had once topped the charts.

Singing came first. Born in Sharon, Pennsylvania, in 1938, he was performing professionally at 7 and on KDKA Radio in Pittsburgh at 8, according to the Associated Press obituary carried by ABC News. By 10 he had moved with his mother to Los Angeles, where he joined the Mitchell Boys Choir and appeared in films including White Christmas, On Moonlight Bay, War of the Worlds and Peter Pan.

In the late 1950s he formed The Lettermen with Jim Pike and Bob Engemann, and the three voices found an audience fast. Their 1961 reading of Fred Astaire's "The Way You Look Tonight" rose to No. 13 on Billboard's Hot 100 and drew a Grammy nomination, and at the 1962 ceremony the newcomers were also in the running for best new artist. "When I Fall in Love" went Top 10. So did a medley pairing "Goin' Out of My Head" with "Can't Take My Eyes Off You," which brought another Grammy nod. Over roughly a decade the trio put 19 more songs on Billboard charts, ending the run in 1971 with "Everything Is Good About You." Four Grammy nominations came in all.

The hits slowed. The road did not. The Lettermen worked college campuses across the country and stages in Japan, the Philippines, Germany and South America. Members came and went, but the group always stayed a trio, and Butala stayed at its center. When Engemann died in 2013 and Pike in 2019, he was the last of the original three.

David Haskell, the group's manager and a friend of about 50 years, described a performer who made a point of greeting fans before or after shows and never charged them for it. "He lived to be on stage," Haskell told USA TODAY in a story republished by Central Oregon Daily. "He lived to bring people joy. He never met a person he didn't like."

That instinct explains the other half of his life. Dining at the Riviera Hotel in Las Vegas one night in 1963, Butala was greeted by name by a busboy and realized the young man had sung lead on the nation's No. 1 record only three years before. Butala helped him get a job with another group, and the idea of a vocal group hall of fame took hold. He pitched it to hotel and entertainment companies for decades until, in 1995, Sharon businessman James E. Winner Jr. agreed to fund a start. The Vocal Group Hall of Fame opened in downtown Sharon in December 1997, with Butala as founder and chairman, and inducted The Lettermen in 2001. "It's been a lifelong dream," he told The Vindicator in 2004, adding of his hometown, "I haven't given up on Sharon."

Wine was another inheritance. His great-grandfather Josip Butala planted vineyards in Croatia in 1875, and his grandfather Miko started Butala Vineyards in Sharon from vine cuttings carried over from Croatia, the Napa Valley Register reported. In 1987 Butala turned a 40-acre horse property in the Vaca Mountains into Bordeaux-style vineyards, and by 2009 Artesa Winery was bottling a 2006 Napa Valley cabernet under the Butala Vineyards name.

He retired from full-time performing in May 2019 but never fully left. In February 2020 he was on hand, and spoke, as The Lettermen received the 2,689th star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, an honor nominated and sponsored by the group's own fan club. In June 2025 he surprised a Lettermen audience in Manitowoc by joining the singers in song, then quizzed Haskell about how the show's video screens worked. "He loved every bit of it and was so proud of it," Haskell said. The trio tours on with a newer lineup. "What he wanted is continuing," Haskell said.

He is survived by his partner, Sue Shimek-Kuche; his children, Anthony J. Butala, Rebecca Butala How, Lisa M. Butala and Regina M. Butala; five grandchildren; and his siblings. The group's statement announcing his death summed him up in five words: "Tony never met a stranger." At his wish there will be no public viewing. Celebrations of life are planned in Wisconsin and California, and the family has suggested donations to the Lakeshore Humane Society in Manitowoc.

What he built is easy to name. There is the 1961 recording of "The Way You Look Tonight" and the string of hits behind it, a trio still touring under the name he helped launch nearly seven decades ago, a star on Vine Street, and a slope of Bordeaux grapes in the Vaca Mountains that began as a horse pasture. Beneath all of it sits the conviction he carried out of that 1963 dinner in Las Vegas: a singer who once had the country's biggest record deserved a place of honor, not a job clearing tables.