Laurie DeYoung doesn't hesitate when asked for a defining moment from her 24-plus years as the morning voice of WPOC-FM. The moment was not heard on air, has nothing to do with the country music the station plays and happened well out of the public eye. But it goes a long way toward explaining why she has remained a dominant force on Baltimore's airwaves for more than two decades, and why she was honored in Nashville on Tuesday with her induction to the Country Music DJ Hall of Fame.

About two years back, she says, a couple of young women in their 20s approached her husband, Ed, before services at their Timonium church, where he serves as director of the worship arts ministry. They'd been big fans of DeYoung's for years and were wondering whether they could meet her. Sure thing, he said, and the next day he did the introductions.

"They told me they had been victims of an abusive mom," DeYoung says haltingly, struggling for words for the only time in an hourlong interview at WPOC's North Baltimore studios. The mother "had a lot of issues, alcohol issues. And they said that I got them through their childhood. In the mornings, they would turn on the radio, and they said it was like ... they said, 'You were just there for us every morning.' "

DeYoung smiles and fights back a tear, then smiles even more broadly. There's no telling how many times she has told the story, how many times she has replayed it in her mind. But it clearly moves her. "To have these two girls stand there, weeping, telling you that 'You were there since we were little, and you were one of the only constant things in our life,' that's pretty good, that's an amazing moment. And it will always be the best moment I ever had. I just can't imagine something topping it."

That, friends and fans alike agree, is the Laurie DeYoung they tune into every morning, the working mom who shares stories about her family; who keeps it clean and usually upbeat (but isn't above acknowledging when she's having a rotten day); who asks her audience questions like, "What's the greatest thing you've ever learned from someone who wasn't a member of your family?" and delights in their responses.

"Laurie has just always been able to talk to her audience as a friend," says WJZ-TV's Marty Bass, who has been giving the weather reports and bantering with DeYoung on-air almost since the day she arrived in Baltimore and at WPOC in 1985. Adds Mark Williams, who has been delivering traffic reports and playing Ed McMahon to DeYoung's Johnny Carson for 13 years: "When the mike goes on, it's like we're just sitting around a dining room table, or having dinner somewhere."

On the air, that ease translates into a breezy rapport with Williams, her producer, Jeff St. Pierre, and her audience. Although the days when she could pick her own music are long gone - a video screen near her microphone displays the predetermined set list supplied for her every morning - DeYoung is clearly captain of the ship when it comes to chatting with her audience. "It's exhilarating, to stay connected to people," she says, unsolicited.

Of course, when it comes to longevity and respect and getting inducted to halls of fame, a little success doesn't hurt. And DeYoung has had plenty. In fall 1991, she was the area's top-rated morning-show host. In spring 2000, she had the top-rated morning show among listeners ages 25 to 54, radio's most sought-after demographic. And last month, according to numbers provided by Arbitron, she averaged the second-highest number of total listeners per week of that same age group, with 114,700.

"Talk about consistent!" marvels Steve Rouse, former host of WQSR-FM's morning show. "At some point in the '90s, our show finally surpassed her show for a little while. But the bottom line is, she's been up there for 20-some years."

DeYoung, 53, lovingly cultivates her fan base. But she understands that success in radio offers no guarantee - Rouse, for instance, was among the city's most popular voices when WQSR stopped using DJs in 2005. Radio station profits have been declining and cost-cutting is rampant, meaning that no job - not even one held by a fan favorite like DeYoung - is safe.

"Nobody's bulletproof, I don't care how good their ratings are," she says. "I don't know if you want to call it cynicism, but I wake up every day thinking I'm going to be fired."

WPOC program director Meg Stevens makes it sound as if her morning DJ has nothing to worry about. "I think great talent wins out," she says. "It's that simple. It's like great music gets played; great talent will be on the radio."

For a woman so closely identified with country music, DeYoung started her life considerably north of the Mason-Dixon line - in Minneapolis, where she was born in 1956 to Alfred and Mary Lou Kuhnle. At age 2, the family moved to Detroit; five years later, they settled in Grand Rapids, Mich., about two hours northwest.

From her father, DeYoung would get her enviable ability to put people at ease. "My dad was a really good communicator; he was lovely in front of people," she says. "He was one of those guys, everybody who ever met him felt like they were his best friend."

From her mother, who largely remained home to raise the couple's five children (a sixth, Paul, died as an infant of spinal meningitis), young Laurie developed her love of music. "Mom was a piano player by ear, a fabulous musician," DeYoung says. "I grew up with a lot of music all the time."

But not, she notes, country music, about which she was largely ignorant. "I grew up in Michigan, and there just wasn't a lot of country music. We would see 'Hee Haw' on television, and for a lot of people, if you didn't grow up with country music in your home, that was your image, that was it - popping up in overalls out of a cornfield, cracking really lame jokes."

Shortly after graduating from Western Michigan University in 1977 as a communications major with a minor in theater, DeYoung got her first full-time radio gig, doing a little bit of everything at WSHN in Fremont, Mich., about 45 miles from her Grand Rapids home.

"You played everything from the Rolling Stones to Perry Como.," she recalls. "You did car-deer accidents, you talked about people's funerals. It was a very small town."

DeYoung would later land a job at WLAV back in Grand Rapids, with leeway to play pretty much what she wanted to play. So what would the future Country Music DJ Hall of Famer have on her playlist? Todd Rundgren, Genesis, Peter Gabriel, Yes.

In fact, it would take six more radio stations and two major relocations before country music and Laurie DeYoung would finally make each other's acquaintance.

DeYoung had migrated to San Diego, where she and partner Rocky Marlowe had a morning show until financial difficulties forced the station to shed much of its on-air staff. Out of a job after just five months, embarrassed about having to head back to Grand Rapids after the people there made such a fuss about her leaving for the big time, DeYoung was happy to listen when Marlowe called about a job waiting for them at a country music station in Baltimore.

DeYoung took the plunge. "I figured I had this partner who did know a lot about country, so it was like going to school for a couple of years."

Her timing, it turns out, couldn't have been better. "I spent a couple of years learning, and then, all of a sudden, Garth Brooks hit, and everything opened. I was basically new to the format when everybody was new to the format - when Vince Gill, the Judds and Mary Chapin Carpenter, all these people, were flooding into it. All of a sudden, country was the hot thing. And I just happened to be there."

She and Marlowe remained partners for two years. Then he left, and DeYoung was teamed briefly with Bill Bailey, an established old-boy country DJ from Louisville, Ky. The result was a disaster - WPOC's program director at the time, Bob Moody, a member of the affiliated Country Music Radio Hall of Fame since 2007, winces at the memory. "On paper, it looked great," he says. "In practice, it was a train wreck."

Recalls DeYoung, "They brought in somebody they felt would be a total opposite. I was 31, he was 60. They thought it would be such a fun thing, to have this young woman and this older kind of gruff guy. It wasn't anybody's fault it didn't work. It was just bad chemistry. It was no chemistry."

Within months, Bailey was gone and DeYoung was on her own - where she'd still be more than two decades later.

"It was obvious to me pretty early on that Laurie was a big part of the attraction of that show," says Moody, who stayed at WPOC through 1996 - and was chosen by DeYoung to introduce her at last week's induction in Nashville, Tenn. "When people would call the show, they would ask to speak specifically with Laurie."

Just as Baltimore has embraced her, DeYoung says, she has embraced the city. She and Ed, married for 32 years, live in the Towson area with their daughter Paris, 17, a junior at St. Paul's. They have two grown sons: Graham, 27, is a musician living in Los Angeles, while Taylor, 21, is a filmmaker now living at home but getting ready to leave soon for L.A.

"When we came to Baltimore, it felt different to me," she says. "I felt like the people were friendly. All those things you hear, about it being a big city, but like a small town - it is that. ... I feel very comfortable."

And country music? DeYoung embraced that long ago. "One of the things I love about the format is that there are so many kinds of country. You can get very traditional, like Miranda Lambert's latest CD, where she was singing very traditional country-sounding songs, like her new single, 'White Liar.' Or you can get Taylor Swift, or Rascal Flatts, or Keith Urban, who makes a lot of inroads into more of the pop format.

"I still love music," she says, "the power of music and a good song and a good lyric and a well-written [melody] to transport you to a different place. I'm listening to Keith Urban's new song, 'I'm Going to Cry,' or hearing Carrie Underwood sing about a 'Temporary Home' - that's still pretty cool, to be a part of that. That's pretty amazing."

Laurie DeYoung chooses her perfect 10-song playlist: • Lyle Lovett, "Nobody Knows Me"

•Mary Chapin Carpenter, "Only a Dream"

•Keith Urban, "Days Go By"

• LeAnn Rimes, "What I Cannot Change"

•BeBe & CeCe Winans, "Stand"

• Dave Matthews Band, "The Space Between"

•Taylor Swift, "Fifteen"

•Jason Aldean, " Johnny Cash"

• Andrea Bocelli, "Con te Partiro"

•Lyle Lovett, " North Dakota"