Theodore Carino was born in 1920 in Brooklyn to a Filipino father (from Bauan, Batanaas) and a mother of Norwegian-German descent. As a young boy his family lived in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and then moved back to Brooklyn. He lived on Johnson Street in the Downtown Brooklyn neighborhood, Emerson Place in the neighborhood of Clinton Hill, and later moved to the neighborhood of Flatbush. He attended PS 5, Erasmus Hall High School, and the Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute. After attending college for several years, he joined the Army Air Corps. Carino then had a long career as an engineer in the defense and aerospace industry, working for industry leaders such as Sperry Rand and Lear Jet. He was briefly married to Alice (Tomkins) Lamont, with whom he had one daughter, Janet Stephanie (Carino) Seibel. He met his second wife, Imogene "Jean" Rainey while he was stationed in Tennessee with the Army Air Corps. They lived in Brooklyn, then Queens, West Islip (Long Island), Grand Rapids (Michigan), and finally Florida, where they retired. They had three children, Patricia, Peter, and Phillip.