PASSINGS: Jimmy Ellis, Jackie Lynn Taylor

Jimmy Ellis

Won world heavyweight title in 1968

Jimmy Ellis, 74, who beat Jerry Quarry to become World Boxing Assn. heavyweight champion in 1968 and fought the era’s best fighters including his friend, Muhammad Ali, died Tuesday at a hospital in Louisville, Ky., according to his son, Jeff. He had suffered from dementia for more than a decade.

Ali’s former sparring partner and a fellow Kentuckian, Ellis was among a group of boxers who traded title belts during one of the heavyweight division’s most celebrated eras. After winning a 15-round majority decision over Quarry in Oakland, Ellis defended the belt later that year in Stockholm against two-time champion Floyd Patterson in a fight that he also won on points.

Ellis won the WBA belt that Ali held until the latter was stripped of his titles for refusing induction into the U.S. Army during the Vietnam War. Ellis, who was 6 feet 1 and 197 pounds when he took the crown, won 40 bouts, 24 by knockouts, and lost 12 in his professional boxing career.

He was WBA champion until Joe Frazier defeated him in February 1970 at Madison Square Garden in New York. In that fight, Frazier knocked him down twice in the fourth round, and Ellis didn’t come out of his corner for the fifth.

James Albert Ellis was born Feb. 24, 1940, in Louisville, the son of Baptist minister Walter Ellis and his wife, Elizabeth, who raised the family’s nine children.

Ellis began his boxing career at the Columbia Gym in Louisville, where he was trained by police officer Joe Martin, who was credited with spotting Ali’s talent years earlier. Ali and Ellis later shared the renowned trainer Angelo Dundee.

After losing his world title, Ellis fell to Ron Lyle, Joe Bugner and Frazier before retiring in 1975 with an injured left eye. He later developed a form of dementia that is common to boxers.

Jackie Lynn Taylor

Little Rascal became a newscaster

Jackie Lynn Taylor, 88, one of the Little Rascals in the “Our Gang” comedy films, who went on to a career in TV news, died Monday, her husband, Jack Fries, told the Sacramento Bee. Taylor, a resident of Citrus Heights, Calif., had Alzheimer’s disease.

Born Jacqueline Devon Taylor on June 29, 1925, in Compton, she won a child beauty pageant in Long Beach and got her start in show business when her mother, a nurse, took her to a Hollywood casting call.

Taylor had a short run in the early 1930s as one of the Little Rascals. The group of child performers was organized by producer Hal Roach to appear in the “Our Gang” movies, which began in the 1920s as silent films and continued into the 1940s.

“When a child grew too tall or just outgrew the gang, there was always some smaller guy or gal around to take his place,” Taylor told The Times in 1972, two years after the publication of her Little Rascals book, “The Turned-On Hollywood 7.”

She acted in film and on stage before working as a news host for KTTV in Los Angeles and then as anchor or reporter for TV stations in San Diego, Bakersfield, Tulare, Stockton, Salinas and Sacramento. She later became an inspirational speaker.

-- Los Angeles Times wire services