ah.. that's it. adding garbage to .htaccess had no effect. So, I need to mess with httpd conf? 
in httpd.conf, the directives for default / are: 
Options FollowSymLinks 
AllowOverride None 
and for docroot (/var/www/html/) are: 
Options Indexes FollowSymLinks 
AllowOverride None                                               <------- CHANGING THIS TO "ALL" FIXED IT. 
I tried changing this to AllowOverride None: for / this had no effect, for docroot, it hosed everything*. 
*probably because I still had garbage in .htaccess?  Once I took the garbage out, back to square one. ..uh... 
wait, SOLVED, forgot to restart httpd that last time, sorry. all working now, thanks!!! 
(and, now I can't browse those subdirs that I shouldn't be able to look into..)