htaccess help

[pacman99]

Hi,
I don't have much experience with htaccess files so I was hoping someone could help me. I have several directories being served by apache and I want each directory to have it's own configuration. I'd like each directory to be accessible by different users and a few superusers that can access all the directories.

For example, if I have users Joe, Rick, Sarah, Bob, Sandra
I want:

/blah/directory1 to be accessed by Joe, Rick
/blah/directory2 to be accessed by Bob, Sandra
/blah/directory1/some to be accessed by Rick

and Sarah being able to access all of these directories.

I didn't want to add Sarah individually to each directory's htpasswd file. I was hoping there was some sort of "inherit" command or something that could use usernames from two different htpasswd files or at least inherit permissions from a higher level htaccess file.

i.e.

/blah/.htaccess should allow access to all directories under /blah
/blah/directory1/.htaccess should allow people from /blah/.htaccess and some additional people for that specific directory only.

I hope this is clear. I can be pretty bad at explaining.
I tried just adding a htaccess file to /blah and /blah/directory1 but what I found was that people that can access /blah can't access /blah/directory1 (there was no inheriting of htaccess information)

Thanks~