Carlyle was born in Berrien Springs, Michigan, the youngest of three children and one of two sons of Levern and Amy Mangel Manous. His father, a clarinetist and violinist, who had attended Graysville Academy and then Southern Junior College in the early 1930s, started a band at the Pisgah School, now Mt. Pisgah Academy, in North Carolina, and then completed a music degree at Emmanuel Missionary College, now Andrews University, in 1945.

At that time he accepted a position to teach Spanish and serve as band and choir director and music department chair at Auburn Academy. In 1947 he answered an invitation to teach music and French as a missionary at the Adventist College in Chile. This was viewed as an exciting venture by Carlyle, who was eight at that time; however, it would end tragically less than a year later when his father died in April 1948 and was buried near the school.

The family returned to the U.S. that spring, and Amy taught for the next ten years in the grade school at Little Creek Academy, a self-supporting Adventist school in Tennessee. She was largely a self-taught musician who played a number of instruments and provided her children with musical opportunities and challenges. Although she started teaching without a degree, she completed a degree in elementary education in the summers at nearby Southern Missionary College, now Southern Adventist University, seventeen years after she began studying.

Manous recently described how music was a way of life for the family, one that had started when his father was living:

Following graduation from Little Creek Academy in 1957, Carlyle enrolled at La Sierra College, now University, as a music major with trumpet as his major performance area. At the end of two years, he switched to French horn for his last three years. While featured as both a trumpet and French horn soloist while at LSC, he was also involved in establishing the college's fledgling FM station, KNFP, in the late 1950s and was assisting in programming when it started broadcasting in March 1959.

In the summer 1962, following completion of all of his degree requirements, except for two classes, he married Kathleen Louise Parmley, a nursing student. That fall they moved to Ann Arbor, Michigan, where he started graduate study at the University of Michigan and also completed the two classes needed to receive his undergraduate degree from LSC.

In 1963, at the end of that school year, he was invited to teach at San Diego Academy in California and agreed to go there. However, about a week later Pacific Union College music chair George Wargo contacted him, anxious to hire him to teach brass at PUC and assist in the band program at the college and in its related grade school and academy. Arrangements were worked out and Manous started his teaching career at PUC that fall. At the end of his first year, the band director at PUC left and Manous was hired to replace him.

When he had returned to California in 1963, after having spent fifteen months in graduate study at UM, he had only two classes left to complete his master's degree. During that first year at PUC, he commuted once a week in the first semester to the University of the Pacific at Stockton, where he completed the classes, transferred them to UM, and was awarded his master's degree in wind instruments in 1963.

He continued to do graduate work at UM and in 1971 completed a doctorate in horn performance. While at UM he studied horn with Louis Stout, noted performer and teacher of horn and conducting under William Revelli, one of the highly regarded university band directors of all time.

Manous taught at PUC for seventeen years, serving as chair of the department during his last two years there. He left teaching in 1980 to work in his own ceramic tile business but returned to teaching in 1982 with a position first at Napa Adventist Junior Academy in California and then, two years later, at Walla Walla Valley Academy in Washington. He began teaching brass instruments at Walla Walla College, now University, a year later and became a full-time teacher at WWC in 1987.

Manous provided enthusiastic leadership for the college bands and smaller ensembles at both PUC and WWC and conducted numerous festival bands over many years. A sought-after clinician for brass and band festivals, he conducted the band at the Central California Music Camp for a number of years. A knowledgeable and thorough teacher, he also coordinated the music library while at WWC.

From his earliest years as a student at La Sierra, Manous enjoyed a reputation as an accomplished and active performer on horn, giving numerous recitals and appearing frequently as a soloist. He was soloist with the Walla Walla Symphony on four occasions and often a guest performer with ensembles and soloists as they played at WWC.

In 1998, he did research for a paper while attending the International Horn Society at its annual convention, held in Canada that year. That paper was later published in The Horn Call, journal for the IHS. In April of his retirement year he presented a series of four horn recitals on successive evenings, each featuring various aspects of solo and ensemble repertoire for the instrument.

In the summer of 1996, he traveled to the Adventist University in Chile to visit and teach. He enjoyed the stimulation of guest teaching and speaking, performing as a soloist, and visiting with students and teachers. There were some poignant moments also. It was his first trip back to a part of his past that had ended tragically almost fifty years earlier with the death of his father, whose gravesite he was able to visit.

Carlyle and his wife, Kathy, now reside in Jackson, Tennessee, where they are actively involved in the Adventist churches and schools in that area. Their daughters, Carrie and Carla, also reside in the South.

Carrie had played piano and oboe while in school and she still plays piano at church services as needed. She completed a degree in elementary education and is a substitute teacher at that level. Carla majored in English, received a master's degree in library science, and then completed a terminal degree as a media specialist. She works in that area in a public school system in Georgia.

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