My father was a coin collector, and a collector of related things. He also collected medals and tokens, paper money, depression scrip, and old checks drawn on middle Tennessee banks (where he lived his whole life). So when he died, Mom and I and to go through a lot of stuff. Amongst other things, he had a bunch of issues of
The Check Collector, which was a privately published periodical for collectors of checks, with articles about them, ads for sale, etc. There are issues of this on the Internet Archive, if you want to see them.
Oddly enough, one of them has an
article by Chris Wasshuber, in which he gives a short version of the Erdnase story and requests help in finding the check written to Marshall D. Smith to pay for Smith's artwork. It would be a billion-to-one shot if it is ever found, but good for him for asking. The funny thing about it is that the editor of the journal, after Chris's short article, immediately points out that S. W. Erdnase is E. S. Andrews, reversed: "This would be quite a coincidence if it were not purposeful. . . . "