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..)